Tass

ARTICLES ABOUT TASS BY DATE - PAGE 4

George Bush rang up his new friend Mikhail Gorbachev on the phone Wednesday and right away some folks wanted to make a big deal of it. As usual, Tass, which broke the story, wasn`t much help. "An exchange of views took place on current issues concerning the international situation, mainly in Europe, and on the prospects for arms reduction talks," the official Soviet news agency reported somewhat cryptically. Not surprising. Lots of things Tass writes sound somewhat cryptic.

Interior Ministry troops were airlifted into the Azerbaijani capital of Baku Sunday to quell two days of ethnic rioting between Azeris and Armenians that reportedly left at least 30 people dead and more than a score wounded. In the worst outbreak since widespread ethnic violence began two years ago, the official Tass news agency said mobs of heavily armed Azeris rampaged through Baku Saturday night and Sunday in search of Armenians. The latest rioting came as President Mikhail Gorbachev, who has struggled to avoid using force in dealing with ethnic and nationalist unrest, was trying to stem the secessionist tide sweeping the Baltic republic of Lithuania.

Tass, the official Soviet news agency, traditionally has been about as lively as a boiled potato. But suddenly, perhaps as a side-effect of glasnost, Tass seems to be turning into the National Enquirer. This week, for instance, the news agency reported that an unidentified flying object landed in Voronzeh, a city in southern Russia, and three-eyed, knobby-headed aliens got out and took a stroll in the park. The extraterrestial beings were about nine feet tall and dressed in silvery overalls with disks on their chests, Tass said.

Devastating floods swept the southeast corner of the Soviet Union Saturday, adding one more catastrophe to the string of disasters that have struck this nation. Some, like the flooding, were acts of God. Some, like the collapse of part of the Kiev post office last week in which 11 people died, were manmade catastrophes. Some, such as the Armenian earthquake, in which thousands died beneath shoddily made buildings, were a combination of both. Along with the flooding came news of new, apparently brief, strikes in Siberian coal mines and continued ethnic tension in the far south, on the Black Sea coast.

Moving quickly to forge closer ties with Iran, Soviet President Mikhail Gorbachev on Wednesday announced the restoration of rail service across the border and the likely reopening of the Iranian natural-gas pipeline to the Soviet Union. "I have been staying in Moscow for only 24 hours, but I already feel almost at home," the speaker of the Iranian parliament, Hashemi Rafsanjani, said on his second busy day of negotiations with the Soviet leader. The two leaders have their ministers working on a dozen topics of mutual interest, the Soviet press agency Tass reported.

Gangs of youths armed with guns, Molotov cocktails, iron bars, sticks and stones rampaged through a town in the Soviet Central Asian republic of Kazakhstan, killing a number of people and injuring others, the official news agency Tass reported Monday. The rioting in the city of Novy Uzen began over the weekend, Tass said, and appeared to have been prompted by shortages of basic goods, rising prices and unemployment. No exact casualty figures were given, but Tass said the police station and water works were attacked.

Five thousand civilians armed with automatic rifles and pistols stormed a town in Uzbekistan on Friday, leaving at least 100 people injured as ethnic violence in the Soviet central Asian republic spilled over into a sixth day. The attack on the town of Kokand in the southeastern part of Uzbekistan appeared to be among the most serious nationalist strife in the Soviet Union in decades, highlighted by the fact that such a large quantity of ...

The railway tragedy in a remote part of Siberia that claimed hundreds of lives Sunday was the latest in a string of collisions, explosions, fires, epidemics and ecological mishaps that have plagued the Soviet Union in the last three years. Soviet officials and Western experts said Monday that a combination of carelessness, poor maintenance and a decaying national infrastructure were at the root of the disasters. Some warned that serious accidents could increase as the country, desperate to push its economy forward, puts increased pressure on factories, railways and other transport facilities.

The mighty Soviet army withdrew its last beleaguered soldiers from the capital of Afghanistan Sunday, while diplomats from five countries scrambled frantically to patch together a political deal that would keep the pullout from leading to civil war. Radio Moscow, quoting a report in Monday's edition of the Soviet Communist Party newspaper Pravda, said the last Soviet army troops left Kabul 10 days ahead of the Feb. 15 deadline set in a United Nations-brokered...